Unseasonably warm weather hits area

Saturday was a day designed for being outside.

And Katrina Illig, 6, of Charlottesville, spent part of her day winding along the disc-golf course at Walnut Creek Park, chasing wayward throws with her grandparents, dad Kurt and brother Peter, 12.
“[The game] would be better if we were somewhere that was a little more wide open,” Werner Illig, Katrina’s grandfather, said along the ninth hole. “Hitting all these trees isn’t that encouraging.”
Werner Illig and his wife, Janice, were visiting from Denver, where the National Weather Service reported sunny skies and a temperature in the low 30s on Saturday afternoon.
It was the couple’s first time playing disc golf.
Saturday’s early-afternoon temperature in the Charlottesville area hovered around 60 degrees under mostly-sunny skies as the Illigs hiked, accompanied by “Shenandoah,” a Greyhound rescue who in the last two years has gone from running dog tracks in Florida to legging along the trails at Walnut Creek.

Milo Farineau and Chase Rannigan also were out playing the 18-hole course in Albemarle County on Saturday, both shouldering bags that had at least a half-dozen disc clubs each.
“It’s a good way to let off steam,” said Rannigan, who plays the course often with Farineau.

They too spent time pushing through the underbrush looking for a few throws that got away, but neither complained.
“With weather like this, it’s tough not to come out [for disc golf],” said Farineau, who arrived at the ninth hole in a baseball hat and polo shirt blazoned with Boston Red Sox logos.
Farineau, like Rannigan, lives in Charlottesville, but is originally from Fitchburg, Mass., in the north-central part of the Bay State, where rain was threatening on Saturday and the temperature was hanging in the mid-40s.

Today’s Charlottesville-area forecast calls for the temperature to top out at 72 under cloudy skies.